2020 Election: Live Results And Coverage

Although women have made gains in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress over the past several decades, only 44 women have ever served as the governors of their states, and 20 states have yet to have a woman serve in this role.

This cycle, just 11 governorships are up for grabs, and only three of the major-party candidates are women. In Delaware, Julianne Murray won an open Republican primary to take on the Democratic incumbent, John Carney. In North Dakota, Shelley Lenz ran uncontested in the Democratic primary to take on the Republican incumbent, Doug Burgum. And in Missouri, Nicole Galloway handily won a crowded Democratic primary to take on the Republican incumbent, Mike Parson. If Lenz or Galloway wins her race, she would be the first woman to lead her state. However, Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates Lenz’s race as “Likely R,” and Galloway’s as “Leans R.” (Murray’s race is a “Safe D.”) So, there’s a good chance that women won’t make any gubernatorial gains in 2020.

If you wear a mask today when you visit a polling place (or anywhere you might go), you are almost certainly at a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than if you went unmasked. Let’s say that with a little less nuance for the people in the back: Wear a mask.

Look, this is definitely an issue on which scientific understanding has evolved. When the pandemic began, there wasn’t a lot of data about the effectiveness of homemade cloth masks. Scientists — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — were left to make educated guesses about the balance between the benefits of mask wearing and the risks of its unintended consequences. But now we have a lot more data, and the data strongly suggests that masks matter.

Frankly, even the scientists who question the effectiveness of homemade masks, like the University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm, aren’t saying you should just live life like your pre-pandemic normal. Instead, those researchers think the right choice is being heavily isolated from other people, far more so than most of us are right now.

For your sake — and the sake of others around you — wear a mask to the polls.

As has been the case for every election since 1856 — well, save one — the top two vote-getting parties in this year’s election will be … the Democrats and the Republicans. And though a few of those elections have had serious third party challenges, American democracy has remained, for all these years, a two-party system — not just at the presidential level, but also at the congressional and state level.

But why?

Our two-party system is largely a consequence of how we vote. Almost all of our elections are held under rules that allow just one winner, a single round of voting and a plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins). Under these rules, most voters consider voting for a third party to be a wasted vote, since the third-party candidate is unlikely to win. Political resources and ambitions flow into one of the two major parties, thus starving third parties of money and talent.

The U.S. is a rare two-party democracy. Almost all other democracies are multiparty democracies, largely because they have different “proportional” voting rules that use larger voting districts or two-round voting systems that do not punish smaller parties.

Will the U.S. always remain a two-party democracy? After all, more and more Americans are dissatisfied with and feel unrepresented by the two major parties. In fact, two-thirds of Americans say that the two parties do not do an adequate job of representing the American people and they think a third party is needed. According to Gallup, the share of Americans identifying as independents has consistently been in the high 30 to low 40 percent range since the mid-2000s.

It depends on whether we change the way we vote. Some states are trying to do just that: On the ballot today are initiatives in Alaska and Massachusetts to switch to ranked-choice voting in future elections, creating more space for third parties (since third party votes would no longer be wasted). If they pass, the two states would join Maine in using ranked-choice voting — and perhaps building wider momentum to challenge the two-party system in America.

There are more elections worth paying attention to than just the ones for the White House and control of Congress. Control of state governments is at stake, too. When one party controls the governor’s office, state Senate and state House in a given state, it can pass landmark legislation that often goes further than federal legislation does (think abortion restrictions for Republicans or expansions of voting rights for Democrats).

During the Obama administration, Republicans dominated state-level elections, but this year Democrats have the chance to dig themselves out of that hole and take control of more state governments than Republicans. Specifically, the party could take full control of Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and it could also break up Republicans’ monopoly on power in Arizona, Iowa, Missouri and Texas.

But Republicans have some opportunities too. The GOP could seize full power in Alaska, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina, and it has an outside shot of ending Democratic control of Maine. For full details on which legislative and gubernatorial races will be decisive, check out my article from October.

The last jobs report before the election came in early October (we’ll get the next report on Friday). That final snapshot of the economy before voters head to the polls is important, but historically not the one with the strongest correlation to the results.

Instead, Americans seem to care most about how that last report looks compared to the report six months prior to the election. To put it simply: Americans appear to care more about getting better than doing well. But this time around, it’s more likely that the largest thing determining your outlook on the economy is the party you identify with.

What would Biden, if elected, do as president? Obviously it’s hard to predict the agenda of an entire four-year presidency before it starts. We don’t know if his party will have control of the Senate, though it will almost certainly control the House. We don’t know which of Biden’s campaign proposals were just for show and which he really cares about. We don’t know where he and Democrats in Congress might disagree. Most importantly, we don’t know what might happen in the U.S. or abroad that we can’t foresee right now but that would force Biden to dramatically change course. (For example, the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks reshaped George W. Bush’s tenure.)

But it’s worth thinking about Biden’s potential policies in five general buckets:

The immediate crises. It’s almost certain that Biden’s first major policy initiatives would be aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19 and helping the nation deal with the economic fallout of the virus. Policies would likely include increased funding for COVID-19 testing and contract tracing and also aid to states and localities to make up for budget shortfalls they are facing. A Biden administration might also take immediate steps to address climate change, another issue Democrats view as an immediate crisis. For example, an economic stimulus bill with state aid and COVID-19 testing funds could also include some kind of program that hires people for clean-energy jobs.

The Pelosi agenda. Since they won control of the House in 2018, Democrats have passed a ton of legislation in that chamber that the GOP-controlled Senate has not moved forward and that Trump would probably have vetoed anyway. But if Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency, expect these bills to be revived — after all, they are already fully written pieces of legislation that the overwhelming majority of House Democrats supported. These provisions include a $15 minimum wage, a path to citizenship for people who came to the country illegally as children, automatic voter registration, D.C. statehood, barring police from using chokeholds and no-knock warrants, background checks for virtually all gun sales and anti-discrimination protections for LGBQT people.

The left’s wing’s ideas. These are things House Democrats didn’t adopt in 2019-2020 — in part because they are divisive within the party, complicated to execute, or both. Examples include a public health insurance option, the Green New Deal, adding federal judges and/or Supreme Court justices, or making other major changes to the federal judiciary. These ideas are likely to create some division between the party’s more left-wing and more centrist blocs — with Biden likely to try to find some compromises between them.

The executive branch. There are lots of policies that Trump implemented through federal agencies that Biden can unwind — and the former vice president is likely to use executive power to implement some of his own agenda, particularly if Democrats don’t control the Senate. For example, I would expect Biden to reverse basically all of Trump’s immigration policies and insert the U.S. back into the Paris climate change accords and other international agreements. Some liberals are pushing for Biden to use executive power to forgive up to $50,000 of student loan debt for many Americans, a step that would be a bold and probably controversial use of executive power.

Race and identity. Biden, an older white man leading the major party that is most closely aligned with America’s younger voters and those of color, has suggested he wants to really push the nation forward on racial issues in particular. So he might try to make some historic moves on this front. For example, if Biden wins and Democrats are in control of the Senate, I expect to see 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer retire early in Biden’s tenure (to avoid any immediate possibility that Republicans could block filling his seat with a Democrat or leave it open). Biden could then implement his campaign promise of putting the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

We’ll hear a lot about the Electoral College tonight. If you know your history, you know that it emerged as a last-minute compromise during the writing of the Constitution in 1787. And since 1800, people have been trying (and failing) to either reform the Electoral College or get rid of it altogether.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party called for allocating electoral votes by congressional district — as Maine and Nebraska currently do, in part — to eliminate the winner-take-all aspect of the Electoral College. But Democratic-Republicans instead used their supermajority in Congress to pass the 12th Amendment, separating the votes for president and vice president, in order to help Jefferson’s reelection prospects in 1804. (Originally, electors’ two votes all went into the same tally, and the person with the second-most votes became VP.)

But as national parties began to develop, state legislatures began changing their allocation formulas to help their preferred candidate win (generally moving to more winner-take-all formats), sometimes even appointing electors to bypass the state’s voters altogether. Changing or eliminating the Electoral College was a perpetual topic of debate in Congress from 1813 to 1826, with several constitutional amendments getting close, and two passing one chamber but not the other.

Calls for reform continued to pop up intermittently, but the next big push came in 1950, when the Senate approved an amendment to allocate states’ electoral votes proportionally, according to the percentage of votes won by each candidate. That amendment failed to get the requisite two-thirds support in the House. A national popular vote amendment passed the House in 1969, with the support of President Richard Nixon, but failed in the Senate.

The Electoral College may be, as Hubert Humphrey once called it, like a “human appendix” (“useless, unpredictable and a possible center of inflammation”). But because it’s in the Constitution, and at least a third of the country always seems to benefit from it, it remains with us still — and probably will for a while longer. (If you want to read more about all this, check out this article I wrote for Washington Monthly.)

Asian Americans make up roughly 5 percent of eligible voters in the U.S., but they’re a rapidly growing group in the U.S. electorate. According to one of the only polls that provides detailed crosstabs on Asian Americans — the Asian American Voter Survey, conducted July 15 to Sept. 10 — a majority of Asian Americans surveyed planned to vote for Biden this year.

That’s not surprising given that the group leans Democratic overall. But Asian American voters aren’t a monolith. While Indian Americans are much more likely to vote for Biden, Filipino Americans are more split. And Vietnamese Americans, who have historically leaned more Republican, are more likely to vote for Trump than they are for Biden.

This is not the first election to take place during the pandemic this year. There were actually a total of 56 statewide primaries (or primary runoffs) between mid-March and mid-September, giving election officials in most states a practice run of sorts for holding an election under these difficult conditions — and giving us a glimpse of what to expect in the general election.

There were a few clear patterns. First and least surprisingly, mail voting was way, way up in almost every state. Second, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have hurt turnout; every primary after July 14 saw higher turnout than the equivalent election in 2016. Third, the growing pains — namely, long lines at polling places and some voters not receiving absentee ballots they requested — tailed off in the late summer and fall, suggesting that states have improved their processes.

Last week, elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich spent some time looking at how much money Democrats and Republicans have spent on TV ads in swing states. TL;DR: It’s “googobs,” to use Nathaniel’s word.

Why don’t young people vote? Apathy and disillusionment about politics often get the blame. But according to our recent survey with Ipsos, low turnout among young adults may have more to do with the fact that our electoral system makes it genuinely difficult for them to vote. That could make the high turnout we’re seeing from young voters so far this year even more noteworthy — because in many parts of the country, barriers to voting are even higher because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In general, young adults (ages 18-34) were much likelier than older adults (particularly those ages 65 and older) to say that they or someone in their household couldn’t get off work to vote in a previous election, didn’t receive their ballot in time, missed the registration deadline or had trouble finding or accessing their polling place.

This year, though, young people seem highly motivated to vote — just like Americans as a whole. According to our survey, they’re slightly less likely than older voters to say the outcome of the 2020 election really matters (75 percent compared with 91 percent of people 65 or over). But a high share (78 percent) of young people told us they’re planning to vote this year (although, of course, the number who actually cast a ballot will almost certainly be lower).

The pandemic has turned voting from a dull-if-important civic duty into a potentially risky activity. But exactly how risky is it?

I can’t tell you. Nobody can, in fact. One of the difficulties of COVID-19, in general, is that quantifying the risks of specific activities is more an art than a science. We know some of the basics: Outdoors is safer than indoors, smaller groups are safer than larger, wearing a mask is safer than not. But applying that to actual activities is complicated by the nuance of culture, social norms and individual choice. For example: The risk level of dining outdoors with friends is different at a picnic in New England than at a summertime barbecue in Texas.

The same sort of challenges affect attempts to assess the safety of voting. Even the variable most likely to make a difference — whether you can wait outdoors — may be entirely out of your control. Our best advice if you haven’t already voted: Wear a mask, do what you can to avoid peak crowd times and stake out some distance between yourself and other people in line. Maybe time to get creative with a fun and practical distancing device?

Whatever happens tonight and in the following days, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein does a great job in this thread of summarizing some of the top-line political trends we’ve seen over the last four years — in particular, the growing urban-rural divide:

Gallup has been asking Americans for years about how enthusiastic they are to vote — and this year, Americans are fired up! Sixty-nine percent of registered voters said they are more enthusiastic to vote in this election than in previous years. That’s a departure from 2016, when only about half of Americans said they were more enthusiastic to vote than usual.

According to the Gallup poll, conducted Oct. 16-27, overall enthusiasm levels — and enthusiasm levels among Democrats in particular — are about where they were in 2008 when President Obama was elected to his first term. However, in 2008, the share of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who said they were more enthusiastic to vote than usual was about 15 percentage points higher than the share of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who said the same. This year, Democrats have a 9-point lead in enthusiasm, according to the poll.

Some voters who are also sports fans might find themselves casting their ballots in a familiar place today: their favorite team’s home stadium. Since this summer’s racial-justice protests, there has been a movement among sports teams to volunteer their facilities as polling places. And with the coronavirus pandemic forcing the relocation of many polling places to bigger sites that allow for more social distancing, election officials have generally jumped at the opportunity (although some declined the teams’ offers).

In total, at least 39 major-league sports venues — including iconic venues like Madison Square Garden, Dodger Stadium and Lambeau Field — are being used as voting locations this fall. Seventeen of those are NBA arenas, thanks in large part to the activism of basketball players. In late August, NBA players (led by the Milwaukee Bucks) staged a wildcat strike in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The strike ended two days later after, among other things, the league agreed to convert its arenas into polling places wherever possible.

I visited one such sports-stadium-turned-polling-place, Fenway Park, during early voting in Boston, and voter interest was off the charts, with a 45-minute line curling around the block. Inside, voters checked in at a desk in front of the concession stands and voted at booths scattered throughout the third-base concourse. Upon exiting, voters were given an “I voted at Fenway Park” sticker and the chance to take a photo in front of the empty field.

“Imagine someone who is infected as a smoker.” This is a great analogy I heard from Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech.

She was describing the risks of COVID-19 transmission indoors versus outdoors. Just as it’s harder to get away from cigarette smoke inside, it’s harder to get away from infected air inside. There’s no fresh breeze to carry it away, and particularly in smaller spaces, there’s a greater likelihood of just sitting in an invisible pool of the stuff for long periods. The difference in indoor versus outdoor transmission is so stark that a database of more than 20,000 COVID-19 cases found only 6 percent that could be traced to outdoor transmission.

Just something to keep in mind if you’re standing out in the cold today, waiting to vote and feeling crabby about it. You may be chilly, but you’re definitely safer.

Have you voted yet? If you haven’t, make sure you either get to your local polling place or drop off your absentee ballot ASAP! Our voting guide can help. Check the “In-person voting” section for your state to look up the location of your polling place. It’s too late to mail in your absentee ballot in most states, but check the “Submitting an absentee ballot” section to see whether you can drop off your ballot at a local election office, a polling place or a nearby drop box. In some states, if you’re not registered to vote, you can also simultaneously register and vote in person at a polling place up through Election Day.

This year, all signs point to record voter turnout — particularly in battleground states. But even if turnout is high, millions of Americans still won’t vote in 2020. In fact, the vast majority of Americans don’t vote regularly, as we found in a recent survey with Ipsos. And there seem to be a few reasons why:

1. Our electoral system doesn’t make it easy for many people to vote. People who only vote sometimes, or who rarely vote, were more likely than people who regularly vote to report that they or someone in their household experienced barriers like missing the voter registration deadline, not being able to get off work, or being unable to access their polling place. Those barriers could be compounded this year in the states that did not loosen voting requirements or make other efforts to ease the process of voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Americans are disillusioned about politics. In the survey, we asked voters who have missed at least one national election why they didn’t cast a ballot that year. Thirty-one percent said that they decided not to vote because they disliked the candidates, and 26 percent said they thought nothing would change as a result of the election. We also asked respondents whether politicians have an impact on their lives. Eighty-four percent of consistent voters said yes, compared to 80 percent of occasional voters and just 68 percent of nonvoters.
3. People tend to vote when they feel a sense of urgency. This is an especially important point for this year — when the vast majority of respondents to our survey say who wins the presidential election really matters. The feeling that voting will make more of a difference than usual this year could spur many people who don’t vote as regularly to go out of their way to cast a ballot.

So if we do see record-setting turnout this year, this chart could help explain why:

I convinced Galen Druke to wake some of our staff up early on Election Day to see how they’re holding up, what they’re doing to prepare for the day and what they’ll be looking for later tonight.

Millions of Americans have been voting for weeks, but this is it: Election Day 2020 is here, and we’re here to help you make sense of it all.

Voting in the middle of a pandemic has created a number of unique challenges this year — including changing the methods we use to vote and the rules governing them — but it also means that there’s a very real possibility we won’t know who won on election night. (We at FiveThirtyEight are certainly bracing for a long night.)

The stakes of this election are high, too. Enthusiasm for voting, among both Democrats and Republicans, is much higher than it was in 2016, and poll after poll has found that many Americans think this election is very important.

Our forecasts are now frozen — in other words, we’re not collecting any new polls or updating the odds. The final forecasts: Joe Biden is favored to beat President Trump; Democrats have a good shot at taking back the Senate; and the House will very, very likely remain under Democratic control (they might even expand their majority by a few seats).

Of course, no matter your political persuasion, for many the memory of the 2016 presidential election looms large. Will the polls underestimate Trump again? We’ll have to wait and see. Systematic polling errors do occur, but it’s hard to predict their size or direction in advance.

But what we can say is that we’re past the point where a 2016-sized polling error is enough for Trump to win reelection. It would take a bigger error this year. That’s possible, and largely why there is still a pathway for Trump to win the White House. We’ll be tracking all that and more on this live blog. But as I said at the outset, we’re unsure how long it will be before we know who won — it may take days. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong, though — there’s been a huge increase in vote-by-mail this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count. We’ll keep you informed until we do know who won, and we’ll continue to track any outstanding races. We’ll be taking extra care this year, too, to be clear about what the results we do have show, and what the results we don’t have yet could mean — as the vote count could change in a number of key states as more ballots are counted. That also means we won’t be afraid to say what we simply don’t know.

If you have any questions as we muddle through election night/week/month together, be sure to ping us at @538politics.